The world’s most famous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has started accepting contributions in the form of Bitcoin donations. Until now TPB users never had the option to donate to their favorite BitTorrent site, but now they can.

TPB which will celebrate its milestone 10th birthday with a massive party in Sweden in a few months time previously only encouraged users to show their support by purchasing Pirate swag or contributing to the occasional money drive and with the use of banner advertisements. However now the public will be able to support the site via Bitcoin donations!Continue Reading

Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg had been living in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh for the last 4 years, in a bid to dodge a jail sentence in Sweden for internet piracy and breach of copyright laws.

Cambodian authorities arrested 27-year-old Warg at the end of August at Sweden’s request and he was put aboard a flight to Bangkok on Monday night where he will get a connecting flight to his home country.

Warg’s arrest was soon followed by Sweden signing a deal to give Cambodia somewhere in the region of $60m/£37m of development aid. Continue Reading

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In February of this year courts in Sweden tried several high ranking members of the Pirate Bay group and found ruled that they would have to pay the collective sum of €550,000 to the music labels involved in the case. The courts awarded this money as a means of compensating the artists and rights holders for the loss of revenue they experienced.

The court came up with the amount for the damages by evaluating the various albums that were used in evidence during the trial. The amount was calculated based on the fees TPB would have had to pay if they had purchased licenses for that content. Continue Reading

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It has been nearly two months since the British and Dutch courts ordered their Internet Service Providers to block their users’ access to the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. In order to circumvent this blockade, the Pirate Bay launched a series of proxy sites and I.P addresses that allow users in the UK and the Netherlands access to the site.

According to reports from Torrent Freak, the enforced blockade has not affected the P2P traffic. Figures from UK and Dutch ISPs suggest that though there was an initial dip in P2P traffic, sharing is pretty much at the same level that it was before the ban was introduced.

Bans like those introduced by the courts are often referred to as an “online game of whack-a-mole” because the minute sites like this are blocked or have access restricted other alternative sites simply appear to exploit the gap in the market.

If anything, the bans have probably gone a long way towards increasing awareness about file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay. In fact the Pirate Bay’s proxy Pirate Party’s website is now thought to be in the top 500 websites in the UK, more than any of the country’s political party websites.

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Yesterday BT became the last of the UK’s major internet service providers to fall in line with a court order stating that file-sharing site The Pirate Bay should be blocked. BT users who try and access the site via the conventional means – will now see the message “Error – site blocked.”

In a somewhat futile attempt to stay one step ahead of the game, BT went further than the other ISP’s and stopped its users from accessing the new IP-addresses, 194.71.107.80 and 194.71.107.81 that were introduced by the Pirate Bay to help UK users get around the blockade.

In the cyber-chess game between TPB and the censors, TPB made another decisive move, for within minutes of the sites being blocked, they had put up a new set of IP-addresses (.82 and .83) that BT users can still access. At least for now – the citizens of the UK can still access TPB if they know where to look. Continue Reading

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The Pirate Bay and their epic battle against those trying desperately to censor it continues with Windows Live Messenger now jumping aboard on the side of the censors. Microsoft are now blocking all TPB links being sent within its Live Messenger service, the link will appear with a message stating that it has been blocked because it is ‘unsafe’.

By taking this course of action against TPB, which is arguably the internet’s most popular file-sharing site, have opened a can of worms, so to speak! Users are thoroughly angered that all of their ‘allegedly private’ conversations between one another are being monitored, arguing that this contravenes their right to a private conversation!

Another problem that this brings about is the fact that not all of the material on TPB is infringing copyright laws; lots of bands, musicians and artists put their material on TPB for free – just wanting to get it out and to reach as broad an audience as possible. The Microsoft blocking system will even remove links to this kind of material.Continue Reading

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The biggest torrent site on the net Pirate Bay has stopped using torrents and made the transition to magnet links. TorrentFreak who reported the change in an article a few days ago, explain; “All torrent files being shared by more than 10 people have been replaced by so-called magnet links. This means that instead of downloading the .torrent files directly from a central server, they will be downloaded from other BitTorrent users instead.”

Pirate Bay have made this dramatic change, which is likely to strike fear into the hearts of a great many the sites users, in order to make the site “future proof” and ensure that it doesn’t get shut down. Moving to the use of magnet links, though might make the process just slightly longer, will however mean that they are harder to trace. As you are all probably aware, Pirate Bay is one of the sites on the hit-list for the music and film industries who are trying to clamp down on the illegal file-sharing of copyrighted. If their bid to get these sites to shut down is unsuccessful, then they will start clamping down on the search engines themselves, as was highlighted in a leaked letter from the music industry a few weeks ago, which said they were thinking of suing Google for refusing to de-list such sites. Continue Reading